After the bombs:

...The picture strikes me as a gloomy one: no winner, at least some strategic weapons retained by both sides, an enhanced or even preeminent role for the military, a tendency to blame the other side for the disaster, real cause for hatred and suspicion, less knowledge than ever of what the other side was planning or doing...

...The two sides might retain some knowledge of what they had fired at, but at best could only guess at the results...

...Such severely practical thinking never looks much further into the future than next year's budget...

...1) Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would have the capacity to occupy the other side...

...One of them, a young physicist who had been prodded into defense policy by knowledge of what bombs do, said he found such a war unthinkable, his imagination could not carry him beyond the outbreak of hostilities...

...Most people, and especially those professionally involved in major questions of defense, don't: really believe war...

...The first nuclear weapons were a kind of mighty hammer, vast in power but hard to aim accurately...

...But maybe I'm wrong...

...It is not war we shall be talking about over the next year or two, but the cost of weapons-things like a new manned bomber, a superaccurate new land-based missile which can be hidden from Russian surprise attack, the revival of plans for an anti-ballistic missile system...

...They didn't know the answer...

...But that is a side issue...

...An actual war would naturally change all that...

...It looks like one of preparation for war to me...

...It is a curious fact that gloomy subjects can actually enhance the appetite...

...A kind of Zeno's paradox would probably be in effect...

...All such facilities would be early targets in a general war, leaving both sides in a great postwar dark...

...Decisive wars tend to end with the collapse of one belligerent...

...It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the most probable result of a general nuclear war would be a race to recover economic and military strength in order to be ready for a second general nuclear war...

...4) No one would know how the war began...

...It is even possible that the military would itself run the country for a time...

...His study of the subject had convinced him it just can't happen...

...The Russian and American economies might be reduced to a nineteenth century scale by the fighting, but a certain number of twentieth century weapons would remain...

...If one simply refuses the whole question of what to do, in the manner of a horse refusing a jump, then the pattern of the last thirty-five years takes on a certain clarity...

...But there is another possible approach to these matters...

...If this is true, the very elements on both sides which tended to be most suspicious of each other before the war, would probably find their postwar roles actually enhanced, however disastrous the war itself might be...

...A nuclear war might happen too...

...6) Both sides would have only the sketchiest knowledge of the military, economic, and political conditions of the other...

...This enables the victor to dictate a peace...

...For the sake of argument alone, then, let's assume for the moment such a war has taken place, that the destruction and loss of life have been extensive but not universal, and that the shooting has now stopped...

...Responsibility has a foreshortening effect...

...Senator Richard Russell once said that if mankind had to start over, he hoped the new Adam would be an American...

...This would also be the case in Eurasia...

...A free hour in the morning and a subscription to the New York Times are all we need to know that distressing things happen with appalling frequency in this world...

...Intelligence projections of Soviet military capacity ten years down the road are considered to be on the furthermost horizon of the human capacity to see into the future...

...Relations now conducted in a spirit of wary but hopeful caution would be-if they resumed at all-cold and bitter, touched by violent antipathy, and very likely marked by a heartfelt desire for the other's annihilation, if it could only be encompassed...

...People would survive in numbers to reflect on the past and plan for the future...

...Not in the sense that objects can't fall up, spring can't follow summer, two and two can't equal five, a man can't breathe underwater, but in the sense that a father can't kill his own child...

...Not knowing with any certainty who that was - since those responsible would be mostly dead, and the records mostly destroyed - both sides would be at liberty to blame the other for the disaster...

...But of course a father can kill his own child...

...3) Of all the institutions which make up American society, the one best organized to survive both the war itself and the stress, danger, and privation of the postwar world would probably be the military...

...The scale of confrontation would have changed, but not its nature...

...Lettuce, bean sprouts, endive, watercress, chick peas, a dozen kinds of relish, the works...

...As a practical matter each of the two sides would be in control of its own recovery...

...So long as the other side is building weapons-and it is-we have got to respond somehow...

...the effort to decide what to do seems to put all but convinced pacifists firmly in the camp of the weapons-builders...

...It is occupation of that sort-not battle-which completes destruction of an enemy's military capacity...

...The defense professionals coming to power with President Reagan have a new theory that war can best be prevented by a demonstrable capacity to fight one to the finish if it should occur...

...The progress of arms has a glacial quality to it, not in terms of speed-the building has been quite brisk, considered over the long haul-but in terms of fateful inexorability...

...Of several minds: Thomas Powers AFTER THE BOMBS WHERE THE IMAGINATION FALTERS FIVE years AGO the National Academy of Sciences published a long, interesting, technically detailed study which is well-described by its title: Long Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear Weapons Detonations...

...I didn't either...

...The war might drag on for months or even years, but something would always be left...

...He was exaggerating...

...Last summer I asked this question of a couple of academic defense specialists while we were eating healthy lunches in a salad bar in Cambridge...

...In short, there would be a postwar world...

...If it emerged from an international crisis, as seems likely, the general events preceding the outbreak of hostilities would be known, but the precise moment and reasons it turned nuclear would be obscure...

...What do these conjectures add up to...

...2) The shooting would stop before either side had fired off everything in its nuclear inventory...

...But whatever domestic political arrangements emerged in the postwar world, it is hard to imagine that the influence of the military-and of military approaches to geopolitical problems- would be less than they are now, which is very great...

...I can think of six things which are likely...

...Hatred isn't the only thing responsible for hostility between nations, but it certainly helps...

...A major nuclear war would bleed both sides white, not necessarily in exactly equal measure, but more than enough to rule out the possibility of the huge logistical effort involved in occupying a continental power at the far side of an ocean...

...The same would be true in Russia...

...It is hard to think of a year which has not left us with better, more numerous, more powerful, more accurate arms...

...It is accepted military practice always to hold something in reserve, which suggests that no salvo would use more than half or at most three-quarters of what was available...

...The creation of a new central authority would depend heavily on military communications and transportation, and no other institution would have the strength to enforce the harsh measures necessary to suppress looters and allocate scarce resources in a time of possible plague, cold, and famine...

...bombers and cruise missiles was really ninety-five percent, instead of just thirty or forty...

...Some like one system, some another...

...We can expect the same again...

...This is a book which demands to be read slowly, especially by scientific laymen...

...What would be the defense policies of these states...

...One thing is certain: the new theory demands a lot of new hardware, and it is going to be expensive...

...The reason for this is that the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency which monitors broadcasts, the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Omaha, and other sites which the military refers to as "nodes" of communications, command, control, and intelligence (sometimes written in the literature as "CBI") would all be prime targets in a major nuclear war...

...THOMAS POWERS speculative...

...In a postwar world both sides would have substantial cause for hatred, and would know, not merely suspect, that the other was morally capable of assault on a genocidal scale...

...Perhaps their civil defense efforts were even more effective than we'd feared...

...As a result, each side would continue to threaten the other, thus establishing an important psychological link to strategic thinking in the pre-war world...

...The military would inevitably become the locus of order...

...and indeed, those projections have often been wrong...

...The blame for a nuclear war would rest most heavily on the side which first resorted to nuclear weapons...

...But theories for their use come in fits and starts...

...There would be no way for us to know, and, severely damaged, fearing a resumption of the war, we would probably do what we have always done in the past where exact knowledge was lacking-assume the worst...

...From one point of view the difference between defense and war is four letters, but in Washington defense means deciding how much to spend on what...

...Perhaps the Tallinn line really was an ABM system, and it worked...

...is likely, or that it would slip out of control...

...What can we say about the geopolitical facts of life in the postwar world...

...As nations we are already quite hostile despite the fact we have never really damaged or injured each other...

...My mind just stops there," he said...

...The planet would not be rendered lifeless by a general war, nor even the northern hemisphere where most of the warheads could be expected to detonate...

...It is the same with suspicion...

...THOMAS POWERSS...

...It is tough enough to find out what the Soviets are up to now, when normal commercial and diplomatic relations provide broad general knowledge, which is backed up by elaborate (but vulnerable) means of technical surveillance...

...5) A nuclear war would give the United States and Russia their first real cause for mutual hatred...

...There is no question we have been preparing for one at great expense over the last thirty-five years, and we are about to embark upon a whole new round of weapons-building to ensure the Russians know we can respond in kind to anything they might choose to throw our way...

...If deficits in federal spending have anything to do with inflation, the combination of tax cuts and new arms spending in Reagan's program is going to mean a lot of inflation...

...In the Soviet Union the Communist party, an almost equally self-contained institution, would probably survive along with the military...

...Perhaps the attrition rate of our...

...In Washington people don't think about war, but about defense...

...In the final stages the loser's army disintegrates, surrenders in chunks, runs out of munitions as transportation breaks down, or just melts away...

...The damage and injury of a nuclear war would of course be on a heroic scale, the sort of thing which sinks deep as myth into the popular mind, and stays there...

...The real issue, as always, is war...

...Perhaps our own missiles weren't as accurate as we'd hoped...

...This time, they seem to think, everyone will come to his senses at the very latest by September 1914...

...Perhaps they are right...

...President Kennedy arrived in Washington with a similar program for beefing up U.S...

...Anxiety about nuclear war at the moment is like a low-grade fever-a persistent, troubling, half-conscious mix of fear and worry which is rarely articulated...

...Thus the argument goes...

...Much of the'infrastructure of industrial civilization would survive too...

...Perhaps this is a small point...

...In a postwar world there would be no way of knowing whether the other side was worse off, about the same, or even-horror of horrors-relatively unscathed...

...At the end of both World Wars the Allies had more than strength enough to deal with Germany as they liked...

...The land mass of North America would be organized into one or more nation states, just as it is now...

...This is hard to think about clearly...

...Now missiles can be dropped right down into Yankee Stadium from the other side of the planet...

...It concludes the effects would be grim, of course, but not apocalyptic...

...But of course this is all purely speculative...

...Reagan has promised to compensate for these new expenditures by cuts in other federal programs, but odds are this will prove hard to do, as it always has in the past...

...strategic weaponry in 1961, and in short order doubled the defense budget...

...This is what is meant-or what ought to be meant-when it is said that in nuclear war there can be no winners...